PARENTESCO EN FEMENINO: GÉNERO, ALIANZA Y ORGANIZACIÓN SOCIAL ENTRE LOS CHACOBO DE LA AMAZONÍA BOLIVIANA

This thesis could be summarized as a search for answers to a seemingly simple question: what does it mean "to be a woman" from the Chacobo point of view? Throughout the research process we have sought to preserve a delicate balance between two analytical horizons in constant tension. On the one hand, it is clear that "classical" ethnography, and more so kinship studies, are often conducted exclusively from the male perspective - in this sense, we have aimed to document a contextualized ethnography of contemporary Chacobo femininity, while contributing to anthropological knowledge of the Bolivian lowlands. On the other hand, for those who work in the Amazon, it is notorious that many "gender studies" propose conceptual tools of enormous abstraction, whose relevance is not sufficiently clear when it comes to elucidating the precise contexts in which the daily construction of indigenous femininity takes shape. Can we be content, for example, to reduce gender relations to universalist oppositions such as "nature" and "culture", "domestic" and "public" or "production" and "reproduction"? What about local history, processes of change or inter-ethnic relations? In short, the aim is to anchor the discussion of gender relations in the singularity of a specific ethnographic case.